Beware of famous stories. They are great to get fired up, but almost impossible to repeat.
Dropbox famously ran a referral program that gave you extra GB of storage when you invited your friend. It helped them grow from 100,000 to 4 million users in just 15 months. Today, you can get 100GB for $2.5/m on Google Drive.
When display advertising was first introduced in 1994, 78% people clicked on it. Now the CTR must be nearly zero, with ad block being a must. Andrew Chen describes this degradation of a marketing channel in his law of shitty click-through.
He concludes that any channel will become less and less performant as more competitors start to flock in, and as you start to run out of new potential buyers in the audience.
Innovating on distribution
It’s true that successful startups tend to build a great product, but also innovate in distribution. Whether you hack virality (Dollar Shave Club), master SEO (HubSpot), or win at enterprise sales (Cribl). You simply can’t do the same thing in the same market and expect the same result.
Luckily trends tend to move in circles…
Things get bundled and unbundled all the time. HubSpot wins by putting sales, marketing, and support into one product. Close builds better product for sales, Customer.io for marketing, and Front for support.
It’s the same for marketing channels. They get discovered, popularized, and then die. Just to be reborn in a new form years later.
Some marketers say that HubSpot invented content marketing. They really did an amazing job at scaling it, but they didn’t invent it.
Content marketing was “invented” in 1895 by John Deere, the founder of the now $105B tractor manufacturer. It is a magazine for farmers about the latest news, interesting stories, and the best practises about working the land. Notice the “is” — the magazine is still being published today.
So yes, you can do the same things again…
You can beat the law of shitty click-throughs and the law of distribution arbitrage, or however you want to call it. You just have to join the vagon when it’s empty. So do the same things again and repeat the famous stories all over again.